TEXT AND
THE USER
INTERFACE
IT302 Human Computer Interaction
Unit 7 Assignment
Kaplan University

Part 1: Introduction
The interface that was chosen in past assignments was the smartphone. The user can determine how the smartphone is set up, but in general there are some basic designs that every user needs in order to operate their own personal smartphone. These designs consist of icons that a user has memorized. Icons such as settings, home, phone and text are very common on smartphones and are used to help the user personalize their device.
Part 2: Commentary Text
Commentary text makes system states or system functionality visible (Heim 2008). Text should be readable, in that it is easy for the user of the interface to understand and read. The line spacing is very important when making the text on an interface readable. There are other aspects of the interface that make it readable as well such as: line length, formatting, the width of the margins and the scroll bar (scrolling). The interface should also use words that are common and easy for the user to understand. This just means that the designer of the interface should not use words that are not in most users’ everyday language. An example of this type of word is interface or dialog box. If the designer uses words that have no words that are like them in real life then the users of the interface will not try to make them have a different meaning than that which is intended. The text should be clear and not contradict in any way. The users of the interface should be able to visualize the words by creating a mental image of them. Text phrases should be kept to a minimum and should be clear at all times what their meaning is intended to be.
In the interface that I have created, which is a smartphone, I have tried to keep the design as simple and as readable as possible. There are no words that may have multiple meanings. I used the words login and logout instead of the word enter or exit. Help is also very clear what it is meant for. Other texts on the interface that are used and are very easy for the user to understand and therefore making it readable are the contact us and the table of contents. These two examples would have only one meaning and the user can get a mental image of what they are used for. Each text on the interface has a traditional meaning and the interface is set in the background of black and white, so that the contrast remains negative.
Part 3: Help Text
Help text guides the user through the interface. These help text fall into different categories. The first is contextual help. This type of help text is used for a quick reference so that the users do not need to leave the page that they are currently using.
The next help text is procedural help. This is a “How To” help guide for carrying out a specific task.
The third type of help test is reference help. Reference helps is used to look up something that has an online reference.
The final help text is conceptual help. The conceptual help is an overview and provides information and a summary of features. These types of help text are what Microsoft uses to differentiate help methods (Heim 2008).
In the interface that I have created there is a help and it is a procedural help because it actually shows some of the things that the interface is capable of doing. For example, the help button will show the user how the settings operate on the smartphone. It will also show the user how to do specific things like using the phone and looking up things on the internet at the same time. Since the smartphone is able to go online, there will also be a help on the online interface of the smartphone. This will be reference help in that it will help the user of the smartphone look things up that are referenced online. This type of help might also be in the settings tab and be too long to have on the help tab, so it will lead the user to an online reference.
Part 4: Hypertext
Two standards that make up the World Wide Web are Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Hypertext contains links to other text and at its most basic level is DBMS and allows the user to connect to information using associated links (Virginia.edu, 2000). It can also be defined as any type of tag used to jump to something else. The locations that a user might find hypertext are in the actual body of a webpage and on the navigation menus. In the navigation menu it is very important to have the links worded consistently with where the user is navigating to and they also need to be very descriptive of those websites. In hypertext there are three states that a hyperlink can be in. These states are link, visited and active. Link is basically means unvisited and is the color of blue. If a user clicks a hyperlink it will then turn red for an active link and purple after the user has visited the link. You can see this when writing an APA format paper and looking at the references. These references will change the colors that are mentioned above when using the links. There are different styles of hypertext. The styles are CSS and W3C. The CSS specification offers four link states—link (link), active (alink), visited (vlink), and hover (Heim 2008).
In hypertext there are many fonts available and each hyperlink comes with its own font. Since there are different types of fonts, each font requires different levels of pixels. The fonts that require fewer pixels are not as suitable for the internet as those that have a larger number of pixels. The fonts that have fewer pixels are seen in decorative and cursive fonts. Times, New Roman and Arial are the most common types of font that are found on the internet because they are more legible.

Conclusion
This assignment helped analyze the issues related to text on a user interface. We also evaluated the effect of several different textual presentations on the usability of the interface that we created in previous assignments.

References http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0037.html (Authors- Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar, 1993-2000) Retrieved on June 30, 2013
The Resonant Interface: HCI Foundations for Interaction Design (Author- Steven Heim, 2008) Retrieved on June 30, 2013